A Reel Retro Review: HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

With no new films to review for the foreseeable future, Reel Speak will randomly review a classic film from the TCM library every week. Not just for the sake of filling time, but to hopefully introduce some overlooked and perhaps forgotten screen gems from the past to those of us who may be unfamiliar or unawares of their existence. 

 

Haunted house movies are as essential to October as jack o’ lanterns and dead leaves. We’ve seen family homes with angry spirits (POLTERGEIST), large mansions loaded with terror (THE HAUNTING), and even lighter fare for kids (HAUNTED MANSION). There’s nothing better in horror than a house with long shadows that hide secrets or scares…sometimes the simpler the better. Which brings us to William Castle’s 1959 spook-fest: HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. 

 

Frederick Loren (Vincent Price), an eccentric millionaire, invites five people to a party he is throwing for his wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), in an alleged haunted house he has rented…offering $10,000 to whomever can spend the night at the house after the doors are locked at midnight. 

 

Similar to modern closed-quarters thrillers such as THE THING (any version), or even CLUE (1985), HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL uses the simple premise of locking characters up with nowhere to go and letting them react. Aside from the millionaire and his wife who have too much money to do anything else, we have the dashing young test pilot Lance (Richard Long), newspaper columnist Ruth (Julie Mitchum), psychiatrist Dr. Trent (Alan Marshal), Loren’s employee Nora (Carolyn Craig), and the house’s owner Watson (Elisha Cook). It’s a collection of believers and disbelievers; some truly buy into the house being haunted, while other lean towards a practical explanation for the strange happenings. 

 

And those strange happenings are brought to the glorious black-and-white screen by way of simple tricks and props that were used in carnival haunted houses; skeletons that walk via wire, apparitions that seem to glide on the floor, and lights that dim and turn on quickly to reveal something scary. It’s crude but for the most part it works; some of the scares are laughable by today’s standards, while others are downright impressive. 

 

Director William Castle, who for most of his career was known for using gimmicks in his films, seems to be having a ball as he sends one scare after another after our hapless group of guests. Eventually the plot thickens and certain characters have motivators for scaring off or just killing each other off. It gets a bit convoluted and not all of it makes sense, and by the final scene we’re not quite sure what happened or why. 

 

Acting is very good. Vincent Price of course is charming and scary at the same time, and his scenes with his distrusting wife, played by Carol Ohmart, are full of tension. The poor character of Nora, played by Carolyn Craig, seems to get picked on as for most of the film she’s the only one who sees the ghosts...leading Craig to spend most of her screen-time screaming her head off. 

 

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL plays it very close to the chest, as the secrets to be revealed come slowly, if they come at all. But the film does play with the unknown quite well, which is what horror is really all about. It’s scary, just as any haunted house movie needs to be. 

 

BOTTOM LINE: See it 

 

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Reel Facts: William Castle had a reputation for churning out cheap B-movies on time and on budget. Alfred Hitchcock credited him as inspiration to make PSYCHO (1960). Castle later was a producer for ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968). HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL was remade in 1999 with Geoffrey Rush (THE KING’S SPEECH), and Famke Janssen (X-MEN).